'Will you come on and take a glass?' said the dealer, pointing with the butt-end of his whip. 'Crown.' This was sententious for the Crown in the hamlet. Country-folk speak in pieces, putting the principal word in a sentence for the entire paragraph. The thinker shook his head and shut the gate, carefully hasping it. The dealer drove on. 'Who's that?' thought the grey man, watching the trap jolt down the rough road. 'Wants veal, I suppose. No veal here--no good. Now, look!' The group by the broken chain beckoned to the trap; a lad went across to it with the chain, got up, and was driven off, so saving himself half a mile on his road to the forge. 'Anything to save themselves exertion. Nothing will make them move faster--like whipping a carthorse into a gallop; it soon dies away in the old jog-trot. Why, they have actually started again--actually started!' He watched the teams a little longer, heedless of the wind, which he abused, but which really did not affect him, and then walked along the hedgerow downhill. Two men were sowing a field on the slope, swinging the hand full of grain from the hip regular as time itself, a swing calculated to throw the seed so far, but not too far, and without jerk. The next field had just been manured, and he stopped to glance at the crowds of small birds which were looking over the straw--finches and sparrows, and the bluish grey of pied wagtails. There were hundreds of small birds. While he stood, a hedge-sparrow uttered his thin, pleading song on the hedge-top, and a meadow-pipit, which had mounted a little way in the air, came down with outspread wings, with a short 'Seep, seep,' to the ground. Lark and pipit seem near relations; only the skylark sings rising, descending, anywhere, but the pipits chiefly while slowly descending. There had been a rough attempt at market-gardening in the field after this, and rows of cabbage gone up to seed stood forlorn and ragged. On the top of one of these a skylark was perched, calling at intervals; for though classed as a non-percher, perch he does sometimes. Meadows succeeded on the level ground; one had been covered with the scrapings of roads, a whitish, crumbling dirt, dry, and falling to pieces in the wind. The grass was pale, its wintry hue not yet gone, and the clods seemed to make it appear paler. Among these clods four or five thrushes were seeking their food; on a bare oak a blackbird was perched, his mate no doubt close by in the hedgerow; at the margin of a pond a black-and-white wagtail waded in the water; a blue tit flew across to the corner. Brown thrushes, dark blackbird, blue tit, and wagtail gave a little colour to the angle of the meadow. A gleam of passing sunlight brightened it. Two wood-pigeons came to a thick bush growing over a grey wall on the other side--for ivy-berries, probably.